


Sanctuary

by waterbird13



Series: Tumblr Fics [85]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Medication, Mental Illness, Schizophrenia, supportive found families, treatment, unsupportive families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 19:23:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7653694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterbird13/pseuds/waterbird13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is schizophrenic. His sanctuary comes in the form of Pastor Jim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is another fic from Tumblr.
> 
> It's multi-chaptered, each chapter a different prompt in the series.
> 
> Warnings include: mental illness (schizophrenia), medication and treatment and discussion of (including going without), unsupportive families and supportive found families.

No one else in the family’s been schizophrenic. Or at least, Sam doesn’t think so. He supposes he can’t really know, because he doesn’t know anything about Mary or her family, and even information on John’s family is hard to come by.

But he’s never heard of anyone else. Just him.

And he’s fifteen years old and pulled out of school because of his supposedly irrational paranoia.

He didn’t think it’d be helpful to add that it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. The they is vague. Monsters. Child services. Bullies. Anyone. Everyone. There’s someone there. Lurking. Waiting.

His school work’s gone downhill a bit, but it’s a necessary sacrifice for his need for vigilance. They tell him he’s looking worse for wear, like he could use a long shower, but it’s just been off his mind. They tell him he’s cold, he’s not connecting well, that his transcripts call him bright and mostly lively, but they’re just not seeing it.

They tell him he’s speaking strangely, too fast, slurred together, nonsensical at times. Sam doesn’t even get it. It sounds fine to him.

They tell him maybe he’s sick, and they want him to see a different doctor. A specialist.

John’s out of town so there’s no one to stop them, not really, and maybe they shouldn’t let Pastor Jim give his permission but they take it, and Sam sees a doctor.

And that’s how he finds out about schizophrenia. What it is. What it really is.

Not the stuff of horror movies. Just a…thing. In his head. A thing that will take a lot of help.

Pastor Jim gives them permission to start the antipsychotics right away, if they can promise they won’t hurt Sam. They can’t, but they do say they should help, and he allows them to try.

Sam doesn’t want to take them. He doesn’t know what’s in them, sure it is just one more element in a plot to get him. But he takes one, on Pastor Jim’s urging, and the pattern continues.

It takes four tries to get the medicines right. After that comes the talk therapy, like having long conversations with a stranger can help Sam.

It becomes manageable. He’s less convinced someone’s there, following him, watching him. The meds are good. The doctor is good. Pastor Jim is a godsend, making sure Sam has everything he needs. Sam thinks he might be one of those schizophrenics that can manage it, that gets better.

Of course, then John and Dean show up to drag him away for a hunt. Away from his doctor, his school, from Pastor Jim, from everyone and anyone who knows how to help him.

Sam wonders how long it’ll be before things spin back out of control.


	2. Chapter 2

Sam has some of the anti-psychotics left, so he has a couple weeks to figure something out.

But there’s no more talk therapy. No more help, no more support, no more talking through the way his brain is trying to trick him, trying to figure out what’s real and what’s the trick.

Every time Dean and John leave him alone, Sam calls Pastor Jim. He feels bad, because Pastor Jim is a busy man, with a whole parish to care for, but he insists. “I’m here to help,” he says. “You’re one of my flock too, Sam. Now. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

That does help. But when John and Dean are there, Sam can’t pick up the motel phone and make that call. He can’t.

They don’t know. Sam doesn’t want to tell them, can’t imagine how they’ll react. Probably Dean will think of every horror movie that villainizes people like him. John will think he’s possessed or something.

It won’t go well. Human ailments and problems don’t register on the Winchester radar like they do for other people.

So Sam’s trapped in his silence, forcing himself to keep himself on track with nothing more than a dwindling supply of pills and the occasional call to the Pastor who’s too far away to really do much.

The pills run out. Sam tries to call his old doctor and convince them to send the prescription to a pharmacy in the town they’re in, but they won’t prescribe pills in they can’t see Sam. They’re anti-psychotics. It’s serious business. They want to know where Sam is.

Sam hangs up. He knows he can’t tell them that.

He can’t call Jim that often, either. So he’s left floundering.

And then suddenly he knows something’s after him again. Something big, this time. He’s a target. 

John and Dean have scrubbed this town up and down before they settled in for even a week, but that doesn’t dissuade Sam. Whatever this thing is, it’s just really good at hiding.

People start looking at Sam strangely, and he thinks they too are with whatever thing is after him, watching him, checking in on him. Perhaps if he were thinking more logically, he’d realize his speech was speeding up, slurring, making less sense again. But that never occurs to him, and no one points it out to him.

He calls Jim, and Jim knows. He panics, demands to know where the family is, says he’ll come and get Sam, take him back to the rectory, get him some help.

Sam hangs up. No one can know where he is. He doesn’t call Pastor Jim anymore.

“What’s up with you, Sammy?” Dean asks.

“Nothing,” Sam snarls. After that, he starts watching him family. 

Maybe they’re out for him too.


	3. Chapter 3

The pill bottle is empty when Dean finds it. Sam’s just been carrying it around, at first in the hopes that he could get more, somehow, then, as he got sicker, like some talisman with some half-forgotten meaning. Eventually, it just became an object mostly forgotten.

Still, Dean digs it out of Sam’s duffle while looking for socks, and that’s the end of that story.

Because if there’s one thing Winchesters are good at, it’s research. Even non-monster related research. It takes them a little longer than it would to just have Sam do it, but they figure it out.

And that leads to the call to Pastor Jim, because John isn’t an idiot and he seems to be able to see perfectly clearly where this whole thing started from. 

“What in the hell did you do to my kid?” John demands.

“Do? I didn’t do anything,” Jm protests, and Sam can hear him, even through the phone, paranoid and over-observant as he is. “Sam is sick, John. Tell me he’s getting help.”

Sam thinks maybe he should run.

“My goddamn son is not a…a…”

“Schizophrenic,” Pastor Jim supplies steadily. “The doctors disagree. Sam’s better when he sees a doctor, John. His medication helps him. He didn’t sound good last time we talked.”

“You talked?” John barks.

Jim doesn’t answer. “Let me come pick Sam up,” he pleads. “If you’re unwilling to be there for him right now…let me take him.”

John stops for a moment. “You know what?” he says. “If you want him, take him. I don’t have time to deal with this.”

Sam would bolt, if Dean wasn’t blocking the door. If he wasn’t sure what would happen, if he made himself noticed.

* * *

It takes two days for Jim to get him. Sam goes. Whoever is following him continues to do so, but Pastor Jim doesn’t seem dangerous. The opposite, maybe.

The doctor he doesn’t deal so well with. The pills are even harder.

It takes a while for them to work, but they do, allowing him to slowly feel centered again, tell the part of himself that screams paranoia to firmly shut up.

Jim smiles at him over breakfast. “I see you’re feeling on your feet again?”

Sam nods. “When do I have to go back?”

“Sam,” Jim says firmly. “You can stay as long as you like.”


	4. Chapter 4

Sam enrolls in school. In an actual high school, and it’s a long-term plan. He gets to pick his own classes and soccer tryouts aren’t for another two months but he’s already preparing for them, because he’s almost completely positive he’ll be here.

He has a bedroom, too, and it’s a little weird, considering they basically live next to the church, but it’s his own bedroom. Pastor Jim lets him fill the bookshelf with whatever he wants, buys him a new quilt, offers to let him paint the walls if he really hates the color.

Sam doesn’t mind beige, but he does like the soft blue quilt and the dozens of books that are all his, and the cozy little desk in the corner where he can work on homework.

He thought he’d be the weird outcast at school. The messed up kid who’s paranoid to hell and back and talks to fast and slurs his words and can’t keep his brain on track.

But the meds and the doctor helps, so no one really knows except the nurse and guidance counselor, who is always offering him guidance. And while Sam’s more than interested on what she has to say regarding college scholarships–and isn’t _that_  a kick in the head, the ability to really think about school seriously, long-term–he doesn’t want to talk about schizophrenia.

He has doctors for that. And Pastor Jim.

Pastor Jim has been great, listening when Sam needs to talk and helping him re-focus whenever the paranoia creeps up. The worst days are the day where the paranoia manifests in the form of John and Dean coming back for him, because all reassurances ring a little hollow. They might. Pastor Jim can’t promise they won’t.

Sam comes home from school one day and leaves his backpack by the door, about to shout a hello for Pastor Jim, when he hears the man on the phone. _Angrily_  on the phone, an attitude Sam so rarely hears on the man. 

“John, you are not listening to me.”

Sam freezes, cold, ice in his veins, tying his feet to the ground, because this is everything he’s feared since the moment he started to really get what had happened.

“He is doing well. He is doing _great_. But only because he’s getting the care he deserves. He needs more than you can give him.” He pauses a moment. “If you try to take this boy away from here, you will see what I am really made of, John Winchester.”

He slams the phone down, and then turns and realizes Sam’s there. He looks guilty for a moment, then seems to take in how bad off Sam looks, walking towards him quickly but with his hands outreached, open, displaying the total lack of threat.

“I won’t let him take you away,” he promises. “I will not let anyone take you from where you need to be, Sam. I will not let anyone take away what you need. I won’t let them hurt you.”

Sam goes into those arms then, hugging the Pastor tight, and those words paired with the slow, sure hands on his back, if not silence the paranoia and fear still lighting up his brain, at lest quiet them to a more manageable level.


	5. Chapter 5

John and Dean do come back. Of course they do. Blue Earth is a hunter staple, a place to pass through and know a welcoming soul is waiting.

Sam’s still pretty well convinced John’s coming to take him away, no matter what Pastor Jim says.

Sam’s almost eighteen. Technically, John can’t make him go with him in the eyes of the law for much longer. Reality is a very different set of contentions, though.

“It’s going to be okay, Sam.”

Sam doesn’t respond. Can’t. He’s trying to keep himself focused and present. Today’s a day where he could lose his composure, lose his control if he isn’t careful.

He hasn’t told his doctor. Kind of wishes he could, without saying “I’m scared my biological father, who for all the world knows is eccentric but tolerable, is going to kidnap me, even though he has every legal right to take me.”

John and Dean are eating. They got here late, long after Sam and Jim finished, but they’re apparently ravenous and shoveling down the leftovers meant for tomorrow’s lunch. Sam keeps watching them. He has to keep an eye on them, keep watch.

Jim clears his throat. “Sam,” he says. “It’s nine. Time for your meds.”

Sam takes his pills at the same time every night. Routine is supposed to be helpful.

John hears. “What’re you doping my kid up with?” He demands.

Jim lets out an irritated huff. “Sam needs his meds, John. Don’t make a scene.”

“He’s my kid, I’ll make a scene if I damn well–”

“You’ve seen me without them!” Sam bursts fourth. “The way my brain works. I can’t speak right, I talk too fast and I don’t make sense. I get–get paranoid, can’t tell what’s a real threat and what isn’t. Is that what you want me to be like?”

The room is silent for a moment, but Sam isn’t done. “And don’t–don’t tell me it’s all in my head, that I can just get better, either,” he snaps. “That’s not how this works, and until you’re a doctor, you can’t tell me otherwise.” He turns to Jim. “I’m…I’m going to get my pills. And go to bed,” he says, side-eyeing John and Dean. Maybe he can put something in front of the door, seal himself inside, offer himself some extra security.

Jim nods. “Of course, Sam. Have a good night.”

Sam flees, not wanting to hear what the rest of his family has to say. They’ve made themselves pretty clear, he thinks.


End file.
